What have witch trials and Donald Trump got in common?
Horrifically, I think it’s perfectly possible we’ll learn about a direct link via his so-called Christian supporters before his presidency is over. But short of that ghastly prospect, there have this past month been deeply uncomfortable parallels between fervent belief expressed in ‘alternative facts’ – e.g. whether the USA or Europe has given more to Ukraine – and seventeenth century English witch beliefs, which are the subject of my novel-in-progress.
Outside politics, which I don’t want to talk about here, there are also extraordinary parallels in terms of the psychology of belief, or more accurately disbelief, and how people – some people, anyway; let’s call them us – deal with unbelievable change, denial being one of our first ports of call.
As in, I can’t believe this is happening.
One of the best expressions I've read about how this manifests was in The Guardian last Monday, February 17th 2025. (Yup, that’s the kind of us I mean. Sorry if that offends).
In it, Zoe Williams discusses the paralysing shock that for her accompanied evidence of fascism within Trump’s Administration and her deep unwillingness to name it.
‘You’re dumbstruck for ages, not wanting to call the thing what it is. It starts off feeling like embarrassment or coyness – what kind of hysteric runs around shouting “fascist”? A very silly one, surely.’
For her, this feeling morphed ‘into something more superstitious – don’t call the thing what it is because that will only embolden the thing.’
I haven’t felt that superstition personally, but I do understand her sense of mental paralysis.
As she says, ‘If you can’t respond to the news, you can’t look at the news ... When you’re averting your eyes, you can’t even think your way into next month’ because that ‘feels like asking for trouble. Frozen feels preferable to adapting to a new reality.’
So, what has all this to do with writing fiction?
The connection is creative empathy and the use of extreme experiences as research into character – characters like us.
Firstly, with such horror in the world, a caveat.
I would say that the loss of post-WW2 certainties that the USA and Europe share fundamental values does count as an extreme event, one that causes deep psychological disturbance. It is nothing, nothing, nothing like the suffering in Gaza, the West Bank, Sudan, DRC and Ukraine etc. But even listing those war-torn places illustrates how much suffering we are exposed to these days - all of which will be impacted by the altered reality of the world order implied by Trump.
For those of us off the front line, it is valid, I believe, to monitor how I, we, you (as in Zoe Williams) react to this change. Do we freeze. Deny. Look away. Have nightmares. Lose hope. Most of all, do we disbelieve?
For several years now, I have attempted to empathize creatively with a real person from seventeenth century London who believed in witchcraft in an effort to understand and recreate the (fictional) conditions in which he (actually) wrote about a series of witch trials as necessary and just.
It’s very hard at times to think positive thoughts about him. Instinctively I ask, how could he have been so irrational and cruel? How could he have been so gullible?
Currently, I’m giving him a horrible shock to his profound Protestant faith when King James I/VI had his Catholic mother re-interred in Westminster Abbey, with an elegy claiming she and not Elizabeth I was the rightful heiress to the English throne. His reaction? Paralysis and disbelief.
But analysing ‘our’ reactions to comments by Trump and his Administration which totally contradict everything we ‘know for a fact’ – AKA our most profound beliefs – I am trying to find ways into my protagonist’s mindset that I couldn’t have explored without the existential threats from Trump.
Such creative empathy can also be turned on its head: Witch trials happened. James I/VI did that weird stuff. Trump and Vance are going to act on what they believe. The world just changed. Reality flipped. It ain’t about to flip back any time soon...
Cumulatively, I think this sort of thinking can help lessen the power of I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening and open us up to the reality of change.
As I’ve waffled about on ABBA before, neuroscience and behavioural psychology tells us that human minds aren’t very good at objectivity. We perceive what we expect to see. We map new information onto existing knowledge. We rely on experience. Hence, we feel lost when experience fails us as a guide.
Thus, if all fiction is at some level about human experience, reading it and writing it with imaginative empathy might/will/should help us adapt to altered realities.
Yay. Now back to hating on ‘them’. [Only kidding.]
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2 comments:
This is interesting. I really hadn't thought of it this way. If it's not too roundabout a link, the post made me remember the film, The Wipers Times, about the satirical paper some British soldiers produced in the WW1 trenches. Ghastly circumstances led to humour - dark - but humour all the same. There may be inspiration in everything
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wipers_Times
Ian Hislop's play about Wipers Times was brilliant, imo. Gallows humour is fascinating. I'm sure there is a connection. Something about regaining agency/autonomy. They can't stop us laughing. They can make us rabbits in their headlamps. But this stuff about agency is a hobby horse of mine atm so perhaps I see it everywhere.
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